The opening shot finds Michael Keaton floating in midair in what turns out to be an ancient run down theater on Broadway. The room is cluttered with junk and Michael hears the voice of a movie character he played twenty years ago. The voice tells him he was a god and he threw it all away. Birdman is a brilliantly fun film. We have the story of a has-been actor whose last great role was playing a superhero and is now doing a daring project to try and reclaim a bit of his former glory. He ends up working with…
Category: movie review
Life Itself
Life Itself was not what I was expecting. I was thinking this was going to be one of those Real Hollywood Story kind of shows with a lot of old clips and interviews and such. And while there was that, there was also a lot of footage of Roger Ebert in the weeks before he died. Oddly, I didn’t really care to watch a dying man without a jaw getting his throat cleaned with a suction tube every now and then. The rest of the film was fine. The story of Ebert coming up through the newspaper ranks. His years…
The Hundred-Foot Journey
The story of an Indian family in France that somehow ended up starring British actress Helen Mirren. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Our hero is a young man who learns to cook from his mother. His mother promptly dies in classic Disney fashion, and he is left in the hands of his tightwad father. They wander around until they happen upon an abandoned restaurant in a small French town. This restaurant is 100 yards from the region’s only Michelin starred restaurant. The boy, who grew up cooking classical Indian food, is a natural and soon becomes a master…
Still Alice
We never see Alice at the height of her prowess. She is already forgetful and mildly confused as Still Alice opens. We are told that she was a brilliant college professor who wrote a textbook once, but that Alice is only a memory. Her body remains behind as the person she was fades away a little bit at a time. The horror of Alzheimer’s is that we can’t offer the logical treatment for this disease-a cyanide capsule and a glass of water. The person who might make such a choice is gradually replaced by some other person who wants to…
The Theory of Everything
My Father-In-Law was a very clever fellow and he didn’t like A Brief History of Time. He found Stephen Hawking to be a bit full of himself and his pet theories. Geniuses. As The Theory of Everything opens, we find a young Stephen Hawking having a hard time coming up with a subject for his doctoral dissertation. He’s already a gnome like character with his glasses forever at an odd angle and a strange look on his face. We also see that Stephen is a bit full of himself and his pet theories. These opening scenes are mainly about Stephen…
Time Lapse
No one ever has a perfect time machine, there’s no drama if you can easily change things and make the world a perfect place. So all time travel stories have to have a fatal flaw-some little weakness that makes using it a bit of a problem. One way to do this is to set a time limit. Say, you can see into the future, but not very far and only in one place. That’s our premise here in Time Lapse, a camera makes a Polaroid snapshot of events in the apartment across the way, twenty-four hours before it actually happens.…
Whiplash
[easyazon_link identifier=”B00PRX8UBG” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Whiplash[/easyazon_link] tells the familiar story of a clever student and the hard as nails teacher who pushes him beyond his limits to greatness. In this case, our hero is a young drummer who dreams of being the next [easyazon_link identifier=”B010CG29S2″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Buddy Rich[/easyazon_link]. And no, the film isn’t set in 1960. I’m sure other people have played the drums since then, but I’ll be honest and say outside of [easyazon_link identifier=”B000T2PRKC” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Ringo Starr[/easyazon_link], no names come to mind. J.K. Simmons does a brilliant job as the foul mouthed, spirit crushing, over bearing, uber bastard who rules…
Big Eyes
Yes, but is it art? I’ve never been a fan of Picasso or Rothko, but have always felt like they were real artists. And though I love the work of Don Martin and George Pérez, I don’t think of their work as Art. The work of Keane falls somewhere below comic books and somewhere above grade school finger painting. For whatever reason, people in the 60s loved these creepy paintings of kids and cats with big eyes. But why anyone loved or hated the paintings is a mere side issue of Big Eyes, the story of how one man used…
The Maze Runner
Yet another post-humans-have-screwed-up-the-world-and-its-up-to-the-kids-to-save-it film. As usual the kids are tossed into some completely contrived world where they have to make sense of things that make no sense. For a nice twist from the Lord of The Flies model, we have our young heroes working together to survive. I was waiting for them to don their buffs and give themselves a cool Survivor tribal name. Living up to its title, there is a lot of running and there is a maze that would put those silly Game Designers over in Mocking Jay Land to shame. This is a huge complex with…
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001 is Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of science fiction and an all around amazing film. It’s not really one film, but a collection of short films, each with its own little reality. We open with several minutes of harmonized noise and a blank screen. This sets the tone for most of the film, where there is very little dialogue and lots of silence intermingled with classical music. Released in 1968, 2001:A Space Odyssey has better special effects than any film made in the last twenty years, not because they fill every frame, but because they are perfect in their execution and…